Today I was working on the Author's page of the site, trying to clean it up a bit. I especially wanted to bring Dan Duff's title listing to the author's page and eliminate the separate index page for his titles. I started thinking about Dan, and how he was a dear friend, and that led to the friends I grew up during my time in Alderson. As you know Alderson is not that big and my friends list might not seem  numerous, but I don't ever remember thinking I didn't have enough of them. All of you who read these pages I consider my friends even though some of you I didn't know then. But the ones that were close, we lived life together. Those are the ones I miss very much. Some are still here and some have passed away. Which brings us back to Duff.

I don't ever remember Dan being down or melancholy. He was always happy and would bring joy into the room. He was always telling jokes and laughing a lot. He would have my mother in stitches. We always had fun together.  On of his favorite things he loved to do was take lines from the movies we saw and repeat them for days after. He usually had to explain why and where they came from, but they did become funny.

There's a "Droopy" cartoon, where Droopy is a sheep herder and his adversary, a larger bulldog, was a cattle rancher. As Droopy was bringing his sheep to the range of the cattle rancher's land, one of the cows came running up shouting," Moo moo, bah bah, Moo moo, bah bah". The cattle rancher asked the cow what he was trying to tell him. (I know, this is silly story) The cow says, "There's sheep a comin' ya durn fool!" Duff must have repeated that line for weeks.

Dan's humor wasn't funny to one person and that was our city cop. Dan and I was in the Snack Shack one night, sitting at the counter. The town cop came in and sat about three stools down from Dan.  Dan noticed him and then looked at me and with jesters to say, watch this. Dan started singing, "I Found My Thrill, On Blueberry Hill". After a coupe of verses, the cop got up and walked over to Dan and came very close to assaulting him and threaded him to never sing that song in his presence again. Dan apologize and the cop sat back down at the counter. It was a scary moment but I don't remember what it was about.

The one time that made the most impression on me, was when Dan and I drove down to Hinton. I guess the reason we were there was because we went to see some of the girls we knew. After all, we once were members of that infamous band called Eddy Cales and his swinging strings, and Hinton was a frequent visit. Sure enough we saw two girls walking down the street toward us. One of the girls, seeing us got a big grin on her face, rushed toward Dan with arms wide open, and said loudly, "Barry!". It was embarrassing for her, funny to Dan, but a little disappointing to me. But I wouldn't mind if a hundred lovely young ladies standing in a row  and each one came up and hugged his neck and call him Barry, if I could only see him one more time. I really miss him and I will see him again.

If you've never visited the Author's page of this site, there are several hundred articles written by many folks from Alderson. They're listed alphabetically and you can see them here.